A Classic Passes 50

By JEANETTE WINTERSON

Published: January 29, 2012

What happens when the unreliable narrator turns out to be the cultural critic?

What we write about fiction is never an objective response to a text; it is always part of a bigger mythmaking -- the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves. That story changes. George Orwell, writing in 1940 about Henry Miller, has very different preoccupations from Kate Millett writing about Miller in 1970. Orwell doesn't notice that Miller-women are semi/human sex objects. In fact, his long essay ''Inside the Whale'' barely mentions women at all. Millett does notice that half the world has been billeted to the whorehouse, and wonders what this tells us about both Henry Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.

Norman Mailer needed Miller to be like Shakespeare (this is plain wrong, but the need is interesting); Erica Jong wanted to be Athena to Miller's Zeus -- born straight out of his head and saving him from the Feminist Furies in her book ''The Devil at Large'' (1993).

And now? It is some 50 years since ''Tropic of Cancer'' was published in the United States by Grove Press. First published in Paris in 1934 by Obelisk, a soft-porn imprint, it had been banned as obscene in America until a landmark legal victory overturned the ban, allowing Grove to print it legally in 1961. The book became an instant best seller, and Henry Miller stood as the priapic prophet of sexual freedom.

Frederick Turner's aim in ''Renegade'' is to explain how ''Tropic of Cancer'' came to be written, came to be banned and came to be an American Classic.

Turner, the editor of ''Into the Heart of Life: Henry Miller at One Hundred,'' tells a good story. Some of it we know: Hopeless Henry, the literary failure nearing 40, is packed off to Paris in 1930 by his wife, June, now tired of supporting him via low-paying jobs and selling her body. In Paris he becomes Hungry Henry, still living off his wife's erratic handouts wired to the American Express office. He sleeps on office floors or in windowless hotel rooms.

He free-falls, hits bottom and remakes himself as Heroic Henry, who has the courage to say ''[expletive] everything'' and write a great book. The book is so great that it takes the world nearly 30 years to face up to it.

The Miller story told this way beats in time with the story at the heart of Ameri/ca's self-image: Can-Do/Rags to Riches/ Boy Makes Good. That Miller was mostly an unemployed and unemployable dropout is at odds with the Puritan New World work ethic, but in line with America's pioneering frontiersman mythology, where the fast-talking huckster has a six-shooter mouth.

Turner cleverly places Miller in a line of American folklore heroes, real and invented, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Like Huck Finn, Miller the man wants to avoid growing up. Like Mark Twain, Miller the writer wants the flavor and feel of ''brawlers, outlaws, gamblers . . . whores.''

Turner makes the point that while it took America about 60 years to catch up with Walt Whitman, Twain's impact was immediate. ''Here . . . was America talking -- not writing -- in the outsized, colorful monologue mode that had been a century and more in the making.''

Turner repositions Miller alongside Whitman and Twain as an innovator who is anti-literature, not because he is a phil/istine but because the new world that is America needs a new literature. This must be vivid, not refined, made on the docksides and in the sweatshops, not in the study or the university.

Here's Miller the German-American Brooklyn boy, dragged to work in his father's failing tailoring business, entertaining himself at night at the burlesques, where the bawdy tawdry comic and cruel sexualized humor are as alive and real to Miller as the riverbank was to Twain and the workmen stripped to the waist were to Whitman.

When Miller sailed for Paris, he had a copy of ''Leaves of Grass'' in his luggage.

He left behind him an ex-wife and small daughter for whom he had made no provision, and a current wife, June, who was his lover, muse and banker, until Ana?Nin in Paris was able to take over those essential roles.

Turner never troubles himself or the reader with questions about Miller's emotional and financial dependency on women. Miller was obsessed with masculinity but felt no need to support himself or the women in his life. Turner sympathizes with the Miller who must sell his well-cut suits on the streets of Paris for a fraction of their worth, but is apparently indifferent to the fact that June was selling her body on his /behalf.

Indeed, Turner tells us that Miller had to endure ''the most awful humiliation a man might suffer.'' This, presumably, is June's lesbian affair, one she brought home to their apartment, so much so that Miller wrote a novel, ''Lovely Lesbians,'' one of his lifelong rants against women, written around the same time as ''Moloch,'' his rant against Jews.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: A review on Jan. 29 about ''Renegade: Henry Miller andthe Making of 'Tropic of Cancer,''' by Frederick Turner, misspelled the surname of anauthor who wrote about Miller in the 1970s. She is Kate Millett , not Millet.